Words on a page that might help me, or you, someday, maybe.

Margin

Today I celebrated #BookLoversDay by working on my own book, because I’m a narcissist. I went through a phase of working on it, little by little, every night. Inevitably, that work ethic disappeared and so it’s been a while since I last worked on it. Currently, I’m going through my totally-definitely-definitively-finitely last edit.

I’m like halfway through the scribbling in the margins and crossing things out stage, but tonight I decided to start translating those changes from the margins in the printed book, to the word document on my MacBook. The book is 61,000 words, and tonight I actioned the changes on the first 12,000 words. So I’m exactly (basically) one fifth of the way there.

That’s both depressing and encouraging.

I’m thinking about re-submitting it to literary agents. I did that a few years ago, but I think I probably jumped the gun a little bit and submitted before it was ready. In this final edit I’ve found a lot of stupid mistakes/typos that won’t have looked good to any agent reading it. That’s probably why I got rejected from every agent I sent it to.

The thing with agents is that you don’t have to submit the entire thing at once. It’s discouraged, in fact. I only need to submit the first ten or so thousand words. Which I now realise that I have. I have the first ten or so thousand words, and they’re better words this time round. So I could probably start submitting it again. Shit.

I do want to finish editing the entire thing so that I can finally, officially self publish it. I want to be able to list on Amazon or Blurb, so that people can buy it if they want. And then maybe someone will give me a book deal and all of this effort will have been worth it.

Or maybe nothing will come of it, but I can at least be proud of the fact that I actually finished the damn thing.